NEWS

UNC-CH medical students win grant to build homes for needy

By LESLIE H. LANG
UNC-CH School of Medicine

CHAPEL HILL -- The Student Health Action Coalition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine has won a four-year grant to work with Orange County Habitat for Humanity to build houses for the community’s indigent.

The $30,000 grant was one of six awarded nationally by the Association of American Medical Colleges in collaboration with Pfizer Inc. and the Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative. These "Caring for Community" grants help medical schools develop student-initiated community service activities.

"The grant certainly promotes community involvement as a sustaining value for the students, as well as an institutional commitment in its broadest sense," said Dr. Adam O. Goldstein, assistant professor of family medicine at UNC-CH and a SHAC program adviser who helped draft the AAMC proposal.

SHAC at UNC-CH is no stranger to community service. The coalition’s clinic is the oldest student-run indigent health-care clinic in the United States, having been in continuous operation for more than 30 years. SHAC continues to follow its mission "to provide quality, efficient care to the underserved community, including prevention, education and referral." The "underserved community," according to the coalition, includes people who are limited from receiving medical care by barriers of time, cost or location.

In 1997, with support from the university’s Division of Health Affairs, SHAC expanded its programs to become the only fully interdisciplinary program within the division. Currently, students participate from the schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health and social work, as well as physical therapy.

Hundreds of students volunteer each year with SHAC in a weekly clinic, as well through outreach programs to the local community, making SHAC the largest source of student volunteers for community service in health affairs. SHAC recruits and trains more than 400 student volunteers each year.

In addition to running its own weekly health clinic, SHAC is well-integrated into the local community via several existing service projects: Fiesta Del Pueblo, an annual service fair to the local Latino community; Mobile SHAC, which works with the local Senior Center and Council on Aging to provide at-home outreach to isolated seniors in need of health education; and flu shot clinics held at a local homeless shelter.

In the SHAC-Habitat partnership, dozens of medical students, other health affairs volunteers and community partners will build one new house each year in Orange County. The typical Habitat family is a household of four or five – two working parents with two or three school-age children, with an annual salary of $20,000 to 27,000, many of whom spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

"Through the SHAC-Habitat partnership, our hopes are that students will become much more knowledgeable about the relationships between factors such as housing, poverty and employment on health parameters," Goldstein said.

Added John Morehouse, a UNC-CH medical student and SHAC volunteer, "SHAC’s interdisciplinary character and long-standing tradition of volunteerism make it an organization uniquely suited to undertake a new direction in community service."

Along with UNC-CH, other Caring for Community grantees include: the SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Camden.

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Note: Dr. Adam Goldstein can be reached at (919) 966-4090 or adam_goldstein@med.unc.edu
School of Medicine contact: Les Lang, (919) 843-9687 or llang@med.unc.edu